Joel is a senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind and visiting professor at King's College London. He obtained his PhD from MIT where he studied computational neuroscience and machine learning with Tomaso Poggio. Joel is interested in reverse engineering human biological and cultural evolution to inform the development of artificial intelligence that is simultaneously human-like and human-compatible. In particular, Joel believes that theories of cooperation from fields like cultural evolution and institutional economics can be fruitfully applied to inform the development of ethical and effective artificial intelligence technology.

The Concordia Social Simulation Platform and NeurIPS Challenge

Concordia uses language models to create open-ended world simulations that work like tabletop role-playing games. We use it to construct rich agent-based models where simulated agents can interact through a natural language interface. We build Concordia environments to study cooperation in mixed-motive social dilemma situations where the agents can talk to each other and interact with their world in natural language. We also use it as a playground to explore cognitive modeling ideas with generative agents. 

Concordia is open source: github repo.

The Concordia Contest at NeurIPS 2024 is an ongoing competition which challenges participants to construct an agent decision-making architecture that is good at cooperating with others in groups. We’re offering $10,000 in prizes, $10,000 in travel grants, and $50,000 in compute credits for participants from under-represented and under-resourced groups. Sign up here and submit your entry before October 31.

Publications


Selected (old) conference abstracts